Letter to Batch 33 of the Early Retirement Masterclass

Dear Students of Batch 33,

It's been a great honour and privilege to conduct a 5-Day Early Retirement Workshop for you.

Teaching this batch of students has been much more challenging than teaching earlier batches because we decided to transition to Quants Café as our back-testing tool. The tool is less than six months old, and I decided to transition into this when I can adequately perform the backtests to create stock screens for the program. Today's exercise raised some inadequacies in the new training materials, including more video materials and explanatory notes over the next few weeks. I will prioritise training videos and a lab sheet to make training future batches much easier.

Beyond the training in using the tools, the class has also created a very tight portfolio consisting of only 14 stocks. It brutally rejects most blue chips in favour of small caps and REITs. The final yield is exceptionally high at 7.48%.

The situation for the ERM portfolio will improve beginning around Q3 2024. It does not make sense that such a well-run city-state has its equities priced at a PE of around 10. For another, the situation involving REITs will likely turn around once the Fed begins lowering interest rates.

The conversation with the students is also something that keeps me going. I was unaware that the tourism momentum in Singapore has legs because Bruno Mars will be conducting a concert here in a few months. Discussing what authorities and companies are doing about scalpers is fascinating. As mundane as such discussions might seem, they paint a bullish picture of our local economy that justifies our tight portfolio that made two hospitality trust picks.

Lastly, I hope Batch 33 will participate actively in the FB group. I look forward to seeing you in the following community seminar slated for Q2 2024.

Hope to see you then!

Christopher Ng Wai Chung

Three improvements I hope to see for the CPF system

 

Now that the chatter about the CPF changes has died down, it's time for me to develop a wish list for the CPF Board. I have tried to make it as reasonable for the CPF Board to do this, given that the disappearance of the CPF-SA after age 55 would free up some fiscal room to give more for CPF members.

Here's my wish list :

a) Make CPF-Life scale linearly with premiums.

There is a progressive element to CPF-Life payouts that discourages folks from putting more money into the CPF-RA. The CPF-Life payouts per unit premium paid are higher for lower sums committed to the program. This is to provide more retirement assistance to those with less savings.

This policy will no longer be necessary if we provide more top-ups to lower-income groups. ITE graduates who enter Poly already get increased amounts in their accounts. 

The middle-income groups need to feel they are getting a fair amount from participating in CPF Life; otherwise, they will think they are subsidising other citizens when they engage in risk-pooling.

b) End the hypocrisy around the Retirement Sum Top-Up Scheme. Give us something we can use.

The RSTU is a powerful avenue to reduce personal income taxes for high-earning professionals. However, the government will disable RSTU once the member accumulates the FRS to curb too many advantages to the wealthy. But that's not the end of the story; at age 55, RSTU makes a comeback, and you can do it until your CPF-RA reaches the ERS. 

This whole system is dumb because the significant earning years do not entitle most professionals to benefit from RSTU. Thanks to completing CPF-OA transfers every year, I personally reached FRS in my CPF-SA in my early 30s. For the folks who can use RSTU again at age 55, they may no longer have a career that can benefit from tax benefits anymore. CPFB folks seem real niggardly to enact a policy like this. 

With such a high bar to reach 4xBRS, the CPFB may throw a dog a bone and allow RSTU to keep accumulating until ERS. A maximum contribution of $8,000 is a little every year, and CPFB should also have a policy that benefits PMETs, given that we're throwing money at ITE grads to enter Polytechnics. 

c) Have a CPF-Life scheme that pays married couples until both pass away.

 

With so much emphasis on marriage, starting families and having children, it's ludicrous that the CPF-Life scheme does not have an annuity program that continues paying to support the other spouse after the member spouse passes away. 

Of course, if an annuity is designed to pay until both spouses die, the monthly payouts can be calculated to be much smaller by design. Still, I would undoubtedly prefer a fixed payout, at least for my wife, after I pass away. 

Do note that folks with young spouses will get tiny payouts in such a case. This is all set by actuarial tables anyway. 

I want this so much that I'd happily sacrifice that stupid political compromise, the Basic Plan, to make it happen. An alternative would be to allow CPF-RA transfers between spouses. 

Anyway, these are my suggestions to the policymakers. 

Feel free to discuss how feasible they are. 

Update on my crypto positions

 

I have written several crypto articles on this blog over the past year. You can find them here and here.

This morning, as ETH hit over $4,000, I decided to exit all positions in ETH as I've managed to derive a significant amount of returns since I have a leveraged position in ETH in Compound V2. I clumsily closed my leveraged positions since I owed some DAI, then moved the ETH off-ramp on the Gemini exchange and converted the money to SGD. The losses from transaction fees were high, and I lost about $1k in the process, but the money is safely back in my bank account in SGD, and I made some excess funds for my trouble.

When the Terra Luna ecosystem broke down, I could round up some spare change to buy LUNC when it was selling for around $0.000027. You can find a historical record of my thought processes then here. While LUNC is now trading at about 7x my original value, I have previously farmed my LUNC and UST into the Mirror protocol and took in as much spare LUNC and USTC that it could spin off. I currently have about $8,000+ in the Terra ecosystem, but my money is not mobile, as I need 21 days to unstake most of my LUNC.

As far as I was concerned, while I was now sitting on some gains, the most enormous damage I suffered at that time was the effort lost in designing a cryptocurrency course. I can now escape with my course fees and some extra pocket money for the March holidays while keeping my millions of LUNA classics as funny money in the improbable event of a re-pegging of USTC.

As for where the funds are now, I've farmed it into the portfolio I manage under the All-Weather Portfolio, where just 8% is put into GBTC and ETHE. ETFs will be how I will take a position in crypto. There is now a more systemic approach to shift the funds out of crypto when the momentum slows down and becomes overtaken by another asset class. 

Here are some of the thoughts I have about cryptocurrency investing:

• I still think I left ETH early, but I am uncomfortable about some Dua Kang Cryptobros returning on the forums. They can have all the fun getting rich. 
• The gas fees in the ETH ecosystem are brutal in a bull market. This will force many investors to trade ETFs as trading fees are lower, and there is no need to manage wallets. 
• The regulatory regime is also tighter, and I can't withdraw my funds from Coinbase as DBS keeps flagging an error when I try depositing $1 to link it to the exchange. I off-ramped my funds in Geminii and lost a lot to transaction fees. 
• There's plenty of money to be made from regulatory arbitrage. As crypto ETFs slowly get approved, you can take positions to exploit the upswing. There's no real need to buy crypto and store it in your wallet anymore. A brokerage will do, but you must be an AI and enable complex leveraged products.

Finally, I currently have about $8,000+ in LUNC and USTC, but I am already sitting on fairly substantial gains. If the price remains high in 21 days, I might liquidate and farm the funds into the next LUNA-like investment. 

The closest trading idea I have is Keppel Pacific Oak REIT. It stopped paying dividends but still has a high tenancy rate. This could be a multi-bagger, but you must be patient and hold it until 2026. The odds of dividends returning from KORE are higher than USTC pegging. 

From Languishing to Flourishing

 

In this second part of my series on languishing, I focus on some of the remedies that can turn someone who is languishing into someone who is flourishing. 

First of all, I'd like to talk about two possible paths to flourishing :

• The external path is where we keep score and become good at something, like our jobs. We take the external approach when we do something to improve our social status. The external pathway is objectively rewarding, but you get diminishing returns as you age. 
• The internal path is all about meaningful personal change and ethics. As you get older, there are more opportunities to follow it, at least because the nosy relatives who judge you during the New Year family gatherings begin to disappear one by one.

I find the internal path harder to walk than the external one because I can keep score and compare with other people. But I am also aware that post-FIRE, there is now lower-hanging fruit for the internal path.

After that, the steps to flourish all seem like another self-help guide. I wish that future research could dive into more granular detail, but readers can look at the following for now.

• Learn something new - This is too easy thanks to Skills Futures, but my emphasis is to teach something new because the Feynman Techniques shows us that we can reach much higher levels of mastery when we teach something.
• Building Relationships - While the book says that quality matters more than quantity, I wish different personality types could use different strategies. As folks get older, they become better at ending relationships. If only there was more direction on how to do this. 
• Spiritual Practices - Another valuable opportunity, but this world is full of cults and scams. The question for non-religious folks like me is whether we can come up with ideas that go beyond meditation or yoga. 
• Finding Purpose in Life - Philosophy has relatively good answers to address the problem of finding meaning in life. 
• Play—The funniest thing I realised about this section is that play is supposed to allow a person to practice their imagination and break away from an obsession with achievement. But I've been gaming for so many years that I see long-time gamers flouting this rule continuously because competitive games give them that feeling of success that has eluded them in real life. 

I'm incredibly interested in learning new things for folks who read my blog. I'm also okay at building relationships and finding a purpose in life. I suck at Spiritual practices as I lack patience and have attempted meditation and yoga with almost no results in many stages of my life. I've reduced the amount of Play in my life as many gamers find inauthentic means of Flow and building fake achievements. 

Of course, the whole point of this self-audit is to open my mind again to previous failed attempts and try to do better, but with a different approach.

Finally, you can observe how every single point about flourishing does not involve much money at all, but FIRE can be an enabler as it gives folks time to figure out how to flourish. 

On the issue of languishing

 

I'm still on my journey of figuring out what life will be like for me post-50, so right now, I'm trying to understand the state of languishing that a lot of folks I know might be going through. I'm going to dedicate a few articles to this topic over the next few days, as it's useful as a reference as I hit the big 5-0.

Languishing is a state of low-grade mental weariness that counts indifference as one of its symptoms. The checklist of someone languishing is extensive and covers things like feeling that your job no longer matters in the grander scheme of things or losing the motivation to catch up with friends and family. 

The symptom that affects me the most is that more and more things seem irrelevant, superficial, and uninteresting. Last week, I mustered some time to spend $30 on one hour of vinyl record listening and found the experience a significant waste of my time. In fact, the album I picked, Adele's 21, sounded exactly like the one I listen to on Spotify, with some static sound in the background. 

So much about hipsters' claims that analogue music is superior to digital music. 

There are three aspects of well-being that can be used to fight languishing. 

• Emotional well-being measures how happy and satisfied you are with life.
• Social well-being measures how well-integrated you are into society, 
• Psychological well-being measures how much you like about your own personality.

While languishing is very mild and does not require medication, if we do not have a system to cope with this, it can lead to delinquent behaviours and even suicide. It even increases inflammation and decreases antibody production. 

Finally, FIRE can both be a cause and a cure for languishing. 

If you retire just because you can live on your passive income cash flow, you might shut yourself away and stop growing from the day you complete the buildup of your fuck you money. The person being fucked is ultimately yourself. 

But if you are languishing because of a ho-hum job, financial independence can give you the power to reinvent your career or find your calling. 

In the following article, I will discuss some preventive measures that you can take to prevent languishing in life. 

Some clarifications on some of my CPF videos and articles

 

For the past week, we've been working hard to fact-check some of the materials being put up on the Dr Wealth blog. As you may notice, some numbers differ between my article and another Dr Wealth shareholder. 

• Louis Koay's article can be found here.
• My article is here.
• I also have a video here.

There has been feedback that my article contradicts Louis' as we project a different payout for CPF-Life.

I need to write an article to clarify my numbers as they are part of a thought experiment to project the amount of money needed today in our CPF-RA to lead a comfortable lifestyle based on 2021 figures from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. In 2021, that number is $1,421; that amount today, assuming 3% inflation, is close to $1,560 in today's dollars.

Now I've got a severe problem because most of the tables from the press will start with a multiple of BRS today, then allow the amounts to compound for ten years, then use the CPF Life Estimator to project monthly payouts many years later when the member reaches 65 years old. The narrative is that you will have a nice payout when you hit 65 if you let your money compound in the CPF-RA until you can start paying annuity premiums to get a monthly payout. 

There are too many degrees of unpredictability when we do this because we need to know how much annuity premiums cost in the far future, how much annuity costs depend on interest rates in the far end, and the average life span of a Singaporean. If humanity finds a cure for cancer, everyone's lifespan will extend by 3 years, and annuities will become more expensive per dollar of payout. On top of that, we will have problems projecting the basic expenses of a 65-year-old ten years in the future. A more significant proportion of 65-year-olds is spent on medication, and medication has an inflation rate higher than our reported amounts. I have evidence of this - my evidence comes from the Medisave BHS, which grows faster than 4% yearly. 

So when I use the CPF Life Estimator to figure out how much I need in CPF-RA today, I can't work the 10-year 4+% compounding into my figures from age 55-65. I have to input the amounts a 65-year-old member has today. Then, I used the CPF Life estimator to calculate my payout immediately in 2024. This extremely theoretical exercise will result in a monthly payout much lower than the Louis Koay article or mainstream media. 

We need to know how much is adequate to cover today's expenses. i.e. In 2024 dollars.

My conclusion remains that we need at least 3 x BRS in our CPF-RA when we hit 65 for payouts, which may be $3k+ as written in other articles, to barely meet the basic expenses of a 65-year-old. Another conclusion is that it may be unproductive to put the full 4xBRS into CPF Life as there is a risk of over-insurance as payouts, even with the Escalating Plan, don't seem to mitigate inflation completely, which means that members still need to pick up investing skills and take on market risk to succeed in retiring conventionally. 

The private sector carries a heavy burden when we write articles about CPF. I can lose credibility if I am wrong.

We have been combing through some of the comments raised in our videos and using the CPF website to fact-check our materials against the statements made. The CPF website needs to make this a more straightforward process for us. 

Please be patient and understanding if you find factual inaccuracies in my material. 

I intend to come clean if these can be found,

Make Polytechnics Great Again !

If we go beyond CPF reforms, the biggest game-changers are the ones for mid-career changers over 40 who can go back to a Polytechnic to study for a diploma and draw a monthly allowance of up to $3,000 a month. 

I do not have any policy details right now, but I want to share some thoughts on this important game-changer that will create a massive seismic shift in the way we look at educational institutions today, which will upend any of my previous posts on polytechnic education.

At first glance, this looks like a welfare scheme that will give unemployed mature workers a two-year reprieve while they retrain for a new career with no guarantee of an actual job at the end of the course, but if you look carefully at the policy, it would be hard to abuse. Folks who have been unemployed longer than a year do not have a salary track record to get payouts from the scheme. The scheme is also keyed to half your original salary, so it barely covers all living expenses for most mature workers. At first glance, this may not be a successful policy as it benefits the few and may not result in re-employment.

Now, if you are willing to go beyond looking at the scheme as a welfare program for folks who are on the verge of unemployability, I think the genius of the program stands out.

The first effect is that folks are not forced to become gig workers, so they have better options for at least the next few years, which can reduce chronic underemployment. 

The second is the amount of entrepreneurial fervour it can generate. 

Many MNC executives need a risk-controlled option to transform themselves into SME owners. This can become a pipeline for the transformation to take place. 

Imagine I am a successful, mature executive who has a few colleagues who are concerned about restructuring and predict that our careers will be over soon. I can hatch a plot to start a business, but before I can create a minimally viable product and get funding, I need time to pick up the latest skills for running a new business. A few partners can enrol in a Polytechnic to pick up some missing skills and spend the next two years preparing the ship for launch while drawing a small allowance. If the business plan does not work out, I can still get re-employed as a plan B, which is all about optionality - the government is using tax dollars to give you a call option on your human capital. As Polytechnics provides me with access to young classmates and many ITEs grads fresh from NS, I can even build a labour pool from my classmates and provide jobs for them.   

There are a couple of things I hope to see from details in 2025:

a) First of all, bureaucrats will try to plug all loopholes. The path should not be closed to successful executives who are NOT involuntarily unemployed and can generate plenty of income while being a student. I'm selfishly putting this on the table because I foresee a lot of temptation to do this.

b) There should be a decent drop-out provision where someone can drop out of Poly when they find a job or launch a business. This person should be able to suspend welfare payments and still be entitled to a future remaining stream at a later date. Dropping out should be viewed as a success and normalised in a Polytechnic.  

c) As it stands, the core curriculum in most Polys just meets the needs of O-level graduates. Mature students need core subjects that are more relevant to them, like basic business operations and planning, online marketing, prompt engineering, and, of course, personal finance. Significant reforms need to happen here because I'm not inspired by the current Poly core syllabus. I'm taking into account this work as Polys now needs to cope with an O level, ITE, and mature professionals' intake. 

d) In addition to internships, students can work with VCs and Incubators as a subject. They can try their hand at business 

e) Some mature students should be allowed to teach a specialised to get credits.

Anyway, after speaking to a few friends with no problems generating income from their own businesses, everybody seems interested in attending a Polytechnic in 2025 to pick up some AI skills. 

I have even started combing the Poly websites.

This is because I'm confident of earning a decent income from my businesses even as a Poly student, but I am worried that some clause will stop me from enrolling in an institution. I can farm the $3,000 into my CPF or SRS, which I will need to do to hit the new ERS.  

Finally, we now have a credible plan to end the comparison of Polytechnics against JCs. In 2025, Polytechnics will become a new beast, a very strange institution that brings different Singaporeans together to carve out some kind of new entrepreneurial ecosystem in the country.

Or I'm just a dreamer. 

CPF investing is "dangerous"

[ Kyith of Investments Moats has pointed out an interesting point I was unaware of. While I know that RSTU up to FRS into CPF-SA exists, I was unaware that after age 55, you can RSTU up to ERS!

He also sought clarification on what I mean by the uncertainty of annuity payouts at age 65 when annuities are designed to provide fixed lifetime payouts. What I meant was that the uncertainty comes from not being able to predict annuity pricing before payouts begin. The CPF Life estimator is just a rough guide.]

What a historic day! What a landmark Budget!

I'm focusing on one significant CPF policy change: to make everybody's CPF Special Account disappear after age 55. The first effect is that CPF Shielding will no longer work, so folks trying to juice an extra 1.5% from retirement savings can no longer get assistance from a financial advisor. The second effect is that the compounding effect of 4% in the CPF-SA will render some of the 1M65 strategy useless.

You can refer to some of my previous posts and judge whether my articles are prescient on such matters.

• CPF Shielding
• Critique of 1M65

A more detailed treatment of the available financial mitigations for someone over 55 years old will be posted on the Dr Wealth blog later, I just want to share some random thoughts on these changes.

a) What is the political cost of making CPF-SA vanish at age 55

The first thought I have in mind is the political cost of this move. I think the CPFB really wanted to replace the 4% with a variable rate tied to the 10-year bond many years ago but probably refused to make this move because they were concerned about angry voters. 

I think this policy is much milder because it largely impacts richer folks who have over $426,000 in the CPF system who are milking the 4% risk free. If the CPFB no longer owes 4% to many millionaires, they might be able to enact more generous policies for lower-income voters. 

b) CPF-Life is now a cognitive strain on financial decision-making

CPF Life is now very central to retirement planning.

As the 4% is now gone, folks have to decide whether to commit funds into the OA account that gives a measly 2.5% or park monies in the RA which converts to an annuity. I suspect this will engender a lot of anger in the future because CPF-Life payouts can change over time depending on when you use the Life estimator or reach age 65, and folks don't really know when they will die. I think this cognitive burden levied on the populace, while good intentioned, will cause a lot of unhappiness in the future. 

In a future Dr Wealth article, I will provide a framework about how much to put into the CPF-RA after age 55. I will also talk about investing to minimise the market risk whilst retaining at least a 4% dividend yield for a locally focused portfolio. The days of getting 4% risk-free are over.   

c) If you raise ERS to four times BRS, maybe you add a few new policies to make it easier to reach it.

The raising of ERS to 4x BRS is what baffles me. Many features that can speed up the accumulation of retirement funds switch off after you hit FRS. These features include the OA->SA transfer, and the Retirement Sum Top-Up scheme ceases to function once you hit FRS. The central problem of conventional retirement is that if I accumulated just the FRS, CPF-Life payouts would not be able to match the $1,421 in 2021 dollars required for a 65-year-old to live a dignified existence. There will be a $400 shortfall.

Extending the OA->SA transfer and RSTU to 3x BRS would help greatly for folks who want to attain retirement adequacy earlier in life, given that CPF is no longer burdened by the millionaire's CPF-SA accounts. 

The collective effect of this seismic change in CPF policy is that CPF investing is now highly "dangerous". You no longer have a risk-free 4% CPF-SA account after age 55. 

• You still have a risk-free 2.5% account in the form of CPF-OA.
• You can move the funds into CPF-RA but you take on the risk of uncertainty of CPF-Life payouts at age 65 which can be based on annuity pricing. You also don't know when you will die so you struggle with deciding which plan to choose. 
• Finally you can invest in the equity markets and take on some market risk.

I'm actually pleased with these policy changes because it is going to be much harder to ignore our local stock markets if you want a source of returns denominated in SGD. This may actually provide a longer boost to SGX equity markets.

Happy Valentine's Day ! How can we stop the Enshittification of relationships in Singapore.

 

The word of 2023 is enshittification. 

Enshittification is a term invented by Cory Doctorow that describes the degradation in the quality of online platforms that function as two-sided markets. While the details are pretty specific about how it happens, the main culprit is Amazon, which operates by trapping customers into decent services like Amazon Prime, then raising prices and lowering standards in a bid to monetise for shareholders. 

I can stretch the definition by saying that dating platforms are two-sided markets (men and women), and young folks are very used to finding love on platforms like Tinder and Coffee Meets Bagels. 

Has enshittification occurred in these dating platforms yet? That's up to you to judge, but the stories of meeting weird guys who talk non-stop about crypto investing and fuck boys may point to a longer-term decline of such matching platforms. I also think such platforms are disadvantageous to charming talkers who may be charismatic but not visually appealing. 

So, in today's thought experiment, I will be speculating on what I would do to find a mate if I were in my 20s and single today.

a) Use dating platforms as a practice arena

I have described that dating is best done using the Secretary's Problem. Approximately 37% of the time is spent dating casually to determine your preferences. Dating platforms speed up the process of determining your preferences, I can cycle through multiple dates just to understand my preferences. 

The only difference is that I will set low standards, cast a wide net on these platforms, and reject women directly using WhatsApp instead of ghosting them. In return, every date should be pleasant, and I will read up online on what not to do during dates - like eat at Saizeriya, wear Decathlon from head to toe, or talk non-stop about shitcoins.

b) Focus on activities as a more serious arena for meeting good dates

Serious research into married couples shows a high correlation between couples on educational levels and political affiliation. With that insight, it may be wiser to ask questions about where folks with the same qualifications hang out other than work. I found my wife in a Japanese language school, but LLMs have made multilingualism less useful, so I need to think about alternatives if I am in my 20s and single again. I might have to join a book club or learn singing as a first move. 

I may also educate myself in BDSM - Business Development, Sales and Marketing courses because they have a more balanced gender mix. My usual coding and finance classes are not a place to find women. 

I might also seriously consider grass-roots work. I'm quite anti-woke, so hanging around in the community centre to hit on grassroots PAP women should work better than hooking up with a woman from opposition groups who might not be too sure which pronouns she uses.

If I date some woke-redistributive chick who is a fan of Teo You Yenn, and she knows the dating budget comes from dividends stocks, I'm not sure how she will react. 

c) Join a cult or some kind of religious group

If you think about it, religious groups are captive audiences where affiliation makes you a lot more attractive as a mate. Suppose I can get someone rated 6 in mainstream society; maybe joining a cult can get me someone rated 7 because she really has no other option except fellow cultists.

There was a stage in my life when I tried joining a fundamentalist Christian organization to meet women. The women are very single and very hot, but I baulked because I could not see myself in permanent bondage with a Christian cult for the rest of my life. 

I think if I can replay the script, I might go with a more mainstream group like the Roman Catholics or some kind of Buddhist organization. If I pick Buddhism, which is my most appealing option, I will pair it with my interest in Transcendental meditation, so I won't really struggle with a woman who is too devout. 

Now, all this assumes that I'm financially ok to start dating in the first place. I've always been quite strict about my dating life, prioritising financial freedom first. 

Girls should find me safe. I'm happy to pay for any date with money from my investment instruments.

The Year of the Dragon ! Huat ah !

 

I get three opportunities to think about my life every year. The first opportunity was on my birthday, Christmas Day. The second opportunity arises when considering the new year after the holiday season. Finally, about a month later, I got to use some Chinese metaphysics to think about my year ahead. I don't just contemplate my Tiger Horoscope; I'm born on the day and month of the Rat, so I need to think about that, too. The year of the Dragon would be, at best, so-so, but it is a year of change. I must proactively deal with some of my problems and grab each opportunity for 2024 to be good. 

This means that, for Tigers, financially, I can expect little gain. My real estate valuation will be meagre, as most capital gains have already been earned in 2023. While REITs will do well when interest rates start to fall later, this will happen quite late, and I'm not sure US Office REITs would have capitulated by then. I made bold moves on Keppel Pacific Oak REIT, and then they delayed their results until the end of February. This will hurt the value of my portfolio. 

Business-wise, it looks better for us. I'm stabilising my cash flow with more side gigs to deal with even lower revenue on my training business. The final result is fewer work hours than a full-time worker but more cash flow predictability. This arrangement also allows my health to get better. There should be some positive news and collaborations with new partners soon. 

I'm glad I have fought off any temptation to take on vanity mega projects; as I reach 50, I'm putting more time into simplifying my life. From my examination of the literature, pursuing a Simpler Life is complicated because it requires a deep analysis of our lives and priorities.

The School of Life series has something quite profound to say about friendship. Why do we need friends, and what should we expect from them? 

There are three answers to this:

• Friends understand what we go through and give us a sense of normality despite our struggles and idiosyncrasies. 
• Friends help us clarify our vagueness and help us understand ourselves better.
• Friends ease us out of our defensiveness and point to a way out in a non-humiliating way. 

My problem with this framework is that if I apply it to my life, I may have no friends at all, and I would not be a particularly good friend to others either, so I can't complain.

This may reflect the metaphysical struggles of a Tiger facing massive changes this year. You have to put in more effort for the folks who can meet this high bar, but then you need to try to meet this bar yourself. It takes a lot of effort and personal development to do this. Doubly hard for ENTJs.

But a slight tilt in this direction will result in massive changes in your social life that will pay dividends for the rest of your life because loneliness is an epidemic in modern societies. 

I will be headed to Malaysia this CNY, I will resume blogging when I come back next week.

Huat ah !

Discussing the hypocrisy around inherited money

 

For a meaningful discussion, I'd point you to this lovely comic strip by the Woke Salaryman on inheriting nothing. While I do not fully agree with this strip, I am a loyal fan and want to put in some additional points of my own on the issue of inherited wealth.

Before I begin, I want to remind readers that Vicki Robin, who invented FIRE, was heir to great wealth and was somewhat of a hippie.

a) You will always inherit something, whether you like it or not.

One major problem with modern society today is the non-recognition of non-financial capital. Some folks think it's uncool to inherit wealth from their parents. Still, it's ok to inherit conscientiousness and high intellect from professional parents who engaged in assortative mating. In some other cases, folks who inherited the social and cultural capital from their parents still have the gall to call themselves self-made men.   

I don't think you can ever disentangle yourself from your parents. In my case, I've prepared myself to manage my family's money since I was a kid - it was obvious, I had no siblings and lived in landed property. 

But I don't feel bad because I inherited diabetes as well and need all the help I can get. 

b) Wealth itself can change a person's mindset, and it's not always for the worse.

When I was an undergrad, as an only child, my parents let me use $600 every month. That was a princely sum 25 years ago and my dad kinda made sure I knew it. In those days, I was quite bad with my money, but  I always spent it to make myself more competitive. I bought all my engineering textbooks first-hand and I was too lazy to zap the books in the NUS library. I paid excess cash for certification exams and got my MCSE and various Toastmasters awards in my final year of Engineering school, which was helpful in those days and this discipline made it easier to tackle the CFA a year later. 

But truth be told I had no savings then. 

Here's the thing about the magical $600 my mom would give me every month. I felt comfortable spending all of it and knew I was spoilt. So when I started work, I felt no inclination to spend above $600, so I lived like a spoilt undergrad rather than an insecure status-conscious young professional. In fact, when I discovered my personal version of FIRE in my mid-20s, all I needed was $120,000 to get me $600 a month on 6% dividends. And if I just spent $600 a month, it would be super easy to get there with a few increments. 

Then, becoming a millionaire would be easily achieved if I saved every cent I earned at work. 

c) Wealth paradigms upgrade with every added digit to your portfolio

I'm clearly not for disinheriting my kids. I intend to do the opposite and give them a reasonable-sized portfolio to play with when they are still young and dynamic. 

This is because I'm well aware of the kind of mindset when dealing with sums of money and don't want my kids to start a "low level" in this MMORPG called Singapore Life. 

• Until you hit $10,000, you tend to think more like a gambler; some of you make momentum trades to make a decent amount to buy maybe a better meal, or you keep your cash in a fixed deposit. A lot of crypto bros start at this level. 
• At $100,000, a 4-6% dividend flow becomes meaningful enough for you to commit to a proper stock portfolio to at least get a dividend income. $400 a month is consequential. This is why I believe that a $100,000 "bribe" to get kids to pass the CFA III exams is something every parent should consider if they can afford it. 
• At $1,000,000, you will gain enough incentive to operate using different asset classes and may become more interested in volatility and standard deviation. At least because it's painful to lose your millionaire status.
• I suppose beyond $10,000,000, you will expand your horizons towards more private equity or look into wealth preservation through fixed income. Philanthropy probably also starts here. 

All this being said, I can still sympathise with folks who glorify their lack of a financial inheritance. 

I grew up in a landed property estate and spent my childhood being bullied and shot at using plastic air rifle pellets by ACS boys. I suspect the animosity against inherited wealth comes from meeting assholes who stand to inherit plenty of money. In my case, my bully had a wealthy newscaster/publisher, Doyenne's mum, who could buy him a foreign degree.   

But also, like the Woke Salaryman, I guess bullying from ACS boys has also made me more resilient.

How would you design your life if you are young again?

 

When a group of uncles meet up to have a coffee session, we talk about how we will live our lives if we can be in our 20s again. This is an exciting thought experiment, not because we think there's a better way to live your lives for Gen Z, but because it reflects what we think we did right or wrong in our own lives.

What is surprising is that even with two Gen X guys who have many similarities, we would have drastically different answers to what we would do if we were in our 20s again.

A friend, a successful IT professional and landlord, thinks that if he's given a chance again, he will cruise through his 20s. He would work a bare minimum and save money just to travel worldwide. For someone who is actually one of the hardest working IT professionals, he would lie flat and do the bare minimum just to maximise the experiences he can get from the world. He may not even start a family.  

My answer is opposite his. 

My 20s are all about my chaotic energy, which I can bring to the table. I would focus on a remote and output-driven job. Then, I will actively break the employment contract with HR to take on another remote job to get paid in crypto and stack at least two jobs to become over-employed. If I get caught and fired, I will still have another job that pays the bills. 

As I would have no time to spend my money, I would double down and try to reach FIRE before 30, and then I would either join the JET program to go to Japan or take a tourist visa to pick apples in New Zealand. Only after I travel out of my skin will I return to get a tedious, conventional 9-5 job to start a family. 

I invite readers of this blog to share how they would design their lives if they were in their 20s again. There isn't a need to consider whether Gen Z will find this approach feasible - Gen Z grew up in a much different environment.  

You'll be surprised at how much it highlights the regrets and achievements of your own life. 

What about the JC Experience?

 

When the O-level results are released, it is typically not a good time for JC students because the media machine is subtly trying to play down the option of taking the A-level exams via the JC route. As I read the articles, they seem to have painted a very negative picture of the JC student. A childish imp who still needs to wear a school uniform. Someone who does not know what they want to do but has a parochial vision of what success is like in Singapore. And someone bereft of practical skills.

As I'm only really trying to understand the new education system as I now have a child in secondary school, the best I can do is offer some of the more significant experiences I had in NJC in the 1990s. Some of these experiences are good, but some are bad. Overall, they are exciting experiences I would not trade for anything else. 

Even today, when I was feeling down last year, my JC pals from Computer Science got me out for dinner to cheer me up. I even had one JC pal attend my classes last week, whom I had not seen for many years but is a loyal reader of this blog. As most of my clique went separate ways in University, I felt the only issue I had with JC was that it was too short. For folks from NJC, many of us come from neighbourhood schools and saw how an effectively run education institution feels for the first time.  

Here are some of my experiences in a nutshell:

a) A fairly uncharismatic guy was running for the JC council, but he had the misfortune of offending the girls from MGS and the convent schools. Because he wore blue pants for the first three months of JC. The ladies hatched a rumour that he loves lying about being an ACS boy. The story worked, and he got the lowest votes in the election, much to our amusement.

b) We had a school band that was much hated because the lead singer threw a throw into the audience. WTF!

c) A schoolmate of mine did not know what smegma was, that cheesy discharge below the folds of his penis. I told him to ask that girl who took biology in her subject combination. And he did.

d) My friend wrote a rant essay arguing that education is destroying the environment because of the amount of paper used. He was sent for counselling by the worried GP tutor, who thought he had finally snapped and dug himself into depression.

e) Someone slipped a science essay full of sexual innuendo into the school magazine, which had to be recalled. Students were reluctant to give up their copies, so teachers had to beg us to do so in class. The teacher in charge of the magazine was in tears. 

f) Sex education classes conducted by Mr. Clarke were so hilarious that they were better than some episodes of Monty Python. Unfortunately, he raised the bar for a generation of confused adults by talking about swinging from chandelier to chandelier.

g) A few top GP students decide to play a horrible prank on their GP tutor. They independently invented a Korean philosopher and attributed various quotes to him. Because multiple students did this and Google did not exist to fact-check Park Chun Mong, these guys got away with it. 

h) A student trolled Mr. Whitby so hard in class that he told him he said he'd quit and appointed the offending student as GP tutor for the next session. In the next session, Mr Whitby sat down as a student, and the student came prepared to conduct a tutorial session. It ended when the student pointed at Mr. Whitby and said, "Hey, who said you can dye your hair blonde?"

i) I got a bunch of classmates to cheat in a stock market game organised by the Economics Society. We wanted to demonstrate the intellectual superiority of Computer Science students, so we engaged in off-market transactions to consolidate winnings in one championship team - something organizers should have anticipated. There were many complaints, but we knew that the rules did not mention what we did was wrong. Eventually, we were disqualified for insider trading. The ruling needed to be corrected even by today's securities regulations. The president of the club was quite traumatised.

j) I was showing a junior from secondary school on campus when the joker of the senior year walked through the school gate. I told him, "This guy is the funniest guy on campus". At that exact time, that guy scratched his crotch and my junior burst into laughter. He came to NJC the following year. 

k) Some of us needed to gain access to JC facilities to participate in a Micromouse competition during the weekend. We climbed over a gate and broke into the college campus to prepare for it. My classmates will commit a crime to win a Micromouse competition.

l) At one point, students were spreading this rumour that a Physics teacher had a vasectomy over the school holidays. 

I should remind readers that NJC could have been a cooler place to study in 1991. We were labelled stoners by the CJC and ACJC folks. We even have installed a "Stone Garden" in the old campus. I hear of folks from my batch who experience a much more depressing NJC, one that gives more privileges to minister's children. In practice, though, I enjoyed my JC days as part of a crew of fellow lunatics in an asylum and still am grateful that I still have good friends from those two years.

Though we were hard-working as hell when it came to the crunch. I never experienced that level of kiasuism, dedication and conscientiousness until I went to SMU Law School many decades later. 

Personal update on my eye health

 

I've been receiving a lot of messages from well-wishers, so I'd like to provide another update on my thyroid eye disease that has caused double vision and is now treated with special prism lens stockers on my spectacles.

After waiting for a few weeks, I was able to get treated by a government doctor at TTSH, and my previous update on my health has predicted totally different suggestions on what I should do next.

To recap, I panicked when I discovered that I was seeing double and took some urgent steps to get treated in the private sector. I spent a ridiculous amount of money to see three different ophthalmologists. Out of $3,000, about $1,700 was spent on an MRI; the only outcome was that I could get poorly made prism lenses to mitigate the issue. 

The suggestion from the private doctor was to get me into a hospital for three days and get an intravenous injection of steroids into my body. But this will be expensive as I steroids can interfere with my diabetic control and there's a possibility that I have to repeat this regularly if there is no improvement of my situation. I playfully suggested that my budget was only $50,000 as I do not have private insurance, and it seemed this option would blow my budget quickly. 

I consulted some doctor pals, and I was told that outpatient options are available, and this was likely suggested so that most clients with integrated shield plans would end up getting insurance companies to overpay for extra checks. In fact, a promising new drug called Rituximab exists that can help with my eye disease and would not wreak havoc with my blood sugar control. 

With $3,000 down the hole, I was not about to just submit one suggestion from a private doctor, so I booked an appointment with TTSH to see whether I could get a second opinion.

As I have guessed, once the incentives change, the treatment takes a 180-degree turn!

The government doctor considered my case extremely mild and gave me new lenses, fitted professionally after a lengthy process, which improved my eyesight dramatically from my previous lenses from the private sector. He instructed me to observe symptoms if they worsened but suggested no medical intervention. I would have gotten all this for just $275. My only disappointment was that the doctor still needed to attend a conference on Rituximab but promised that I would be considered if a trial was conducted locally.

In the end, I had to pick the option that was gentler for my wallet. Informally, the doctor told me I could do some eye exercises, so I started doing them to see whether they could speed up my recovery.

I do have a third option in reserve. I have two specialists in Malaysia I can contact to see whether I can get some out-of-the-box ideas, but this involves travel and risk. The idea that I can talk some Malaysian doctor into administering Rituximab is really tempting, but what if I get into trouble and need to enter A&E in a local hospital?

Anyway, I'm writing to warn of two extreme suggestions for treating my problem. One is to blow a large wad of cash, get myself hospitalized and take something that affects my blood sugar control with the odds of doing this again if nothing happens. The other option is to just let my eyes heal naturally. 

I wonder if both doctors can be correct.

Government facilities and staff to fit prism lenses to patients are vastly superior to what I experienced in the private sector. I even have evidence as to how badly cut my lenses were. 

( Just don't ask privately for me to share the identities of the private clinics. )

That may be why Benz Hui commented that HK doctors are terrified of Singaporean patients because they tend to do a lot of research before seeing them. 

If you look at my situation, what other alternatives do I have?

 

 

Next ERM/AWP Community Webinar will be on 17 January 2024

I've not conducted a Community Webinar as I've been busy fighting off ailments and stabilising my side gig teaching law subjects in an institution. After prepping a battery of courses, including a cybersecurity module for legal executives, updating my usual investment materials, and debugging my code to provide investment advice, I'm ready to conduct a seminar for alumni and public members. 

The next Community Seminar for the Early Retirement Masterclass and All-Weather Portfolio will occur at 7.30pm on 17th January 2024. 

I will be speaking on the following topics:

a) Invest like a Gambler 

In this theoretical segment, I will discuss how we can use techniques gamblers employ to break casinos to assist us in asset allocation.

b) Introduction to Quants Cafe 

We will walk through a new portal built by Evan Koh of the Stocks Cafe fame that performs screening and back-testing. This will be featured increasingly in our programs that already include Stocks Cafe and Pyinvesting.

c) ERM Portfolio review of 2023 results and outlook.

d) AWP Portfolio review of 2023 results and outlook.

e) How to sign up for a refresher course for alumni.

You can click here to register for the event:

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_BfZ7hMy8R9KK1SN6b7gv7A

Seedly Personal Finance Festival 2024

 

I will speak at the Seedly Personal Finance Festival 2024, Singapore’s largest personal finance festival, on Saturday, 6 April 2024. I've yet to begin planning for the event, but my topic will be related to FIRE. But I hope to introduce a new twist to my presentation that differs from my usual spiel. 
What has been agreed on with the Seedly organizers is this:
How to Achieve Financial Independence & Retire Early (F.I.R.E.) • What steps are needed to reach F.I.R.E.? • How does investing play a part? • How much do you need to F.I.R.E.?
The festival, which is a ticketed event, will be held at the Marina Bay Sands Expo & Convention Centre, Hall F. Each festival ticket will grant you:
• Access to ALL stages and event booths• A Goodie bag worth S$68• A chance to participate in lucky draws and giveaways worth over S$17,300 in total.
Get your ticket at https://bit.ly/PFF2024Speakers and enjoy an additional 20% off the early bird price with promo code: <20OFFDRWEALTH>

The hardest resolution is maybe not to have any resolution at all

 

I was reviewing how I was feeling last year at around the same time and found that I was pretty pessimistic about 2023, and I was essentially correct about how the year unfolded. Things will look terrible until we get a clear signal that interest rates will stop rising. After that, things will look much better. I will leave the details to a Dr Wealth article which I completed that summarises the performance of both my ERM and AWP portfolios.

2024 will be a lot sunnier than 2023 for investors. But for me, getting thyroid eye disease would mean changing my priorities for 2024 - basically, no new initiatives unless my eyes get better. 

So, instead of listing my resolutions, I will list the stuff I would have loved to do next year, but I should hold back until I feel better.

These are my anti-resolutions:

a) Writing a new book on personal finance.

This December, I tried to have a month to complete the fantasy and non-business books I have on my KIV list. I was pleasantly surprised by Haruki Murakami's Novelist as a Vocation. I found the book as gripping as any of his written works as he described his creative process and view on creating works of fiction. One point that has left a deep impression on me is that a great novelist is the kind of person who can look at a situation and store it in his mental cabinet without casting judgment on it. Folks who are compelled to judge are better off being critics or journalists. 

I spent most of the week hanging out with friends and going through social interactions without many filters. I have already warned a pal about a business that could be a front for money laundering operations. Explained to an ex-colleague why an investment scheme may be illegal or a con job. And in a New Year party, why may a young person be a product of assortative mating, is about to engage in it very soon, and thus, part of the problem of income inequality.

Of course, I'm not in the business of writing novels, but it is high time I author a new book that summarises all the new insights I gained since becoming an investment trainer. I hold myself back because the idea of finding a good publisher is quite tempting, given that the proliferation of AI books on the Kindle platform makes self-publishing unsexier by the day.

b) Starting a new channel for lifelong learning

2023 has been a disappointing year for me as my eldest has gone through her PSLE. Without going into much detail, it was more my fault than my kids', as we did not play the game like other parents did. I also need help to convince my daughter to learn the technique of studying rather than actually the subjects in a secondary school as Sec 1 is not much of a consequential year. 

As there are many experts in the learning field, like Barbara Oakley, Scott Young and Cal Newport, I could start a video channel on some tips and techniques to learn better. But this would require my YouTube channel to be repurposed for this.  

If I attempt this, it would require a lot of personal rebranding, but it can lead to more students for my investment courses.

c) Get Overemployed like a Gen Z worker

One of the more remarkable things I see younger workers do is over-employment. They got hired by two employers and delivered enough to keep both happy and draw double the salary. I already have a reasonably efficient setup that allows me access to teaching as part of a private business and a public institution. It is very tempting to find another institution to work for to teach subjects that, well, I need to be qualified to teach.

I've already imagined what a cybersecurity programme would look like for legal executives this year, so I should ask for more work. Another more severe project is resurrecting my cryptocurrency course and running it entirely from Python scripts like AWP. This would mean that I will take three Dr Wealth courses simultaneously. 

As we head into 2024, most folks will try to improve themselves by tackling big goals. I'm one of the few with fairly detailed objectives I need to restrain myself from doing. 

We will see whether, as we enter 2025, I will fail in my resolve and attempt any of these objectives. 

 

 

Thoughts as I enter my final year of my 40s

 

Thanks for all the well-wishes coming in from social media. 

I'm officially one more year from my 50s, and the latest health scare has led me to think about what will happen soon. Typically, entering the 50s would mean crossing over from the unhappiest moments of your life and reaching peace with yourself. For the folks I know who reach their big 5-0, many take a long trip somewhere to reflect upon their lives. The question is whether I should do the same since I enjoy travel quite a bit.

With almost 2/3rds of a person's spent, it makes little sense to still think about achieving more and hitting more life goals. Only some people can be Colonel Sanders, who started KFC quite late. The over-arching theme for someone who got into life's third trimester is some kind of gentle retreat and reprioritisation of life. 

Let's go through some of these strategies I've observed.

a) Compromise

For some folks, compromise is a strategy. As we age, only some get to meet all their life goals. A person who could not get a publishing advance has settled with self-publication, or like myself, I had to pare down my goals of doing legal work to becoming a law lecturer. 

A compromise is good because it conserves energy, allows the attainment of small wins, and enables us to refocus on other important matters in our lives. 

b) De-invest

While I'm still fully vested in the markets, I have told my community my wish to stop applying leverage to my portfolio because I'm simply too old for this, given that I'm still leveraged with my residential property. This does not mean that leverage is terrible as interest rates drop. 

Anyway this is not meant to be a point about finance. We've invested quite a bit in our careers for most of our lives. All it takes is one restructuring exercise to end this. I'm seeing this happen to many folks in their 40s, and inevitably, the strain will cause them to retreat from their peers, isolating them further into loneliness. 

That being said, I recognise how difficult it is to do this - it's something that even a five-digit monthly dividend cannot solve. For me, I try to run multiple gigs to maintain my relevance and find something new to do every few months. 

c) Re-Focus

Finally, there will be things that you will not like in your 50s as much as in your younger days. I've always enjoyed GunPla, until my trip to Japan when I discovered that the kits here are marked up 50%. Since then, I've realised that Japanese goods are a scam. Just because something is Japanese is an excuse to sell $25 sandwiches and $50 Demon Slayer figurines. I hope someone takes revenge by going to Sinjuku to sell Ang Ku Kueh for 500 yen.  

One of the things about getting older is that nothing excites me very much. I'm bored most of the time. Reading is probably the last thing I do with enthusiasm, but turning it into a social event is quite challenging because a lot of the book clubs here are dedicated to the elderly. Many must attract the ambitious and dynamic types I like to hang out with.

While not totally healthy, I am getting increasingly interested in this hobby of solitaire war games. These wargames should not exist as a hobby because they can be converted into software. But it is a thriving hobby for geeks and wonks. You can be commanding the Luftwaffe one day and then trying to survive a US presidential term the next. 

d) Re-dedicate

This leads to my point about people. I observed folks in their late 40s begin to tire of others and their peccadiloes. Some friends are talking about just bailing out. In many cases, this move is justified, as I've done this myself a couple of times - some relationships don't add much value. We came from a generation lacking social media, so hobbies were a unifying theme for making friends. Things are very different these days. I don't have to join a D&D group if I don't like their wokeness. 

But note that making friends is more challenging as you age, and loneliness can be fatal, so remember to replace this with networking sessions. If you don't want to go alone, go with your remaining pals. And these days, I realise that my students often make my best pals. 

So for now, I leave these four points. 

Perhaps in the New Year, I will talk about my plans for 2024.

Have yourselves a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. 

Personal Update

 

As I'm turning 49 next week, it's a good time to update everyone about my life.

a) Managing my Thyroid Eye Disease

Last week, my left eye was occluded, as I can see better with one eye than with two. But a couple of days ago, I got a piece of prism lenses, which improved my look slightly, but there is still some distortion in my vision, and it may take weeks to get used to. But at the moment, I'm struggling to get back to my old productive self, which is challenging as my left eye sheds tears easily, and I give my eyes a rest by taking multiple naps a day.

But the prism lenses are good as they buy me time to transition to government-subsidised care, which can only come online in mid-January. I can't trust my private provider anymore as my options involve high costs and hospital stays - perfect for taking advantage of folks with a high-end H & S policy. The government doctors actually confirmed that outpatient options are available. 

If there's any wisdom readers can pick up from this, incentives matter. If doctors get paid a significant portion of scanning fees, you will always be made to take MRI scans. For folks dealing with information asymmetries in medical care, you should always seek a second opinion, preferably from someone with different incentives. 

Government care is not perfect as my diabetic management can only occur once every 4-5 months, so I am now interleaving visits to a private and govt practitioner. 

b) My side gig

I've started sharing more of my work on my side gig with an educational institution. For three hours a week, I teach legal executives a program on issues running law firms and the specific IT software that comes with it. After my stint at a law firm ended, I wanted to retain my legal knowledge, and I tried to minimise disruption to my training business. 

The work is slowly gaining momentum, and I'm working on a cybersecurity program for legal executives. My career interests me, but I want to remind everyone that I'm a gig worker, and my materials may need approval. 

Also, I might need help maintaining my gig after this one is over in 6 months. This is purely to supplement my dwindling business, which will recover in 2024. 

c) My investment training business

I can handle anything else in my business if I can survive 2023 with my health issues and poor sales. I now run a fairly stable program investing in a dividends portfolio in the local markets and a one-of-a-kind program on operating your own robo advisor to invest in internal ETFs. 

The markets will take a while to recover, but I will struggle much less in 2024. 

d) Financial markets

Regarding investing, 2024 is going to be a good year as interest rate increases have come to an end. I still maintained most investments in REITs, so I would do okay. There could be a chance for a massive upside if a ceasefire occurs or interest rates begin ratcheting downwards. 

But for personal reasons, this is not a moment for aggressive risk-taking. As attractive as getting some leverage seems like a good idea, I do not need to make that much money, and I should keep some reserves for medical emergencies. 

e) Books I am reading

I'm not reading at a pace I like as my eyes get tired quickly, but this month, I have restricted myself to non-business books. I've covered a lot of ground on fiction and tackled a history book that discusses multiple What-If scenarios. I suspect this book will take me all the way into 2024. 

Overall, 2024 is a year of consistent change and evolution - I thrive on change and improvement. If not for my eye condition, I have planned a year of plenty of travel and even the publication of a new book. But at this moment, it's probably not wise to be too ambitious as managing my condition and maintaining all my gigs is already a massive challenge. 

2024 is likely a static year for me. I'd like it to be a lot more dynamic and bring in new stuff to do and meet new friends, but who am I kidding - I turn 50 next year!

Catch you guys again once I turn 49 on Christmas.