Year in review - 2020
TLDR: My investment journey 2020 - a review
Covid has turned the world upside down for everyone. So many of us white collar workers didn’t suffer as much as blue collar workers who faced retrenchment, under employment and evictions because of COVID.
Staying away from your family and friends and connecting via video calls is poor substitute for meeting them in person. But that is sacrifice that is needed to keep everyone safe. So the message is that we should be thankful for what we have.
Now let us review the numbers.
Monthly Savings Rate (MSR)
I want to start off with my monthly savings rate (MSR) as usual. If you are not saving enough as a percentage of your income, then you are not going to FIRE early. I have written about this number being the most important number when it comes to retirement.
Monthly savings rate as a percentage of income
As you can see from the numbers, the one benefit of COVID is that my savings rate has gone up.
No vacations
No flights
No hotel bookings
No eating out (though we ordered in a lot)
No staycations
Reduction in all of these categories helped boost my MSR to 42% from 35% in 2019. I was surprised myself given the amount of online ordering and fancy food deliveries this year.
India Portfolio
India portfolio starting base of 2017 to 2018 , 19 and 20
If I had to make a prediction in March or April of this year whether I expected my India portfolio to be in the positive territory I would have probably said barely. Not even in my most optimistic estimate would have thought we will be here now. Sensex, NIFTY are at all time highs. Mid and small caps have had a even more sharper recovery post the correction.
I very much doubt that this is backed by strong fundamentals. So I did trim my equity positions in late November especially some funds which have increased their expense ratios by a lot ( I am looking at you ICICI FMCG fund) and moved some of those into debt funds.
My Indian portfolio was quite heavy on equities (close to 90%) because I do hold debt funds in other portfolios. I have trimmed it down to 75% equity post rebalancing.
Global Portfolio
Global portfolio value increase starting from end 2017 as base
I started creating a diversified global portfolio via robo advisor StashAway only from Nov of 2017. So this is a slow start which is why you will see massive jumps in the portfolio as a percentage. But the portfolio itself is quite small, but I aim to add to it over the next few years to make it sizeable country and currency hedge.
The investments are global and Singapore based ETFs across equities, bonds and REITs.
Salary
Given our salary revision happens at the beginning of the year pre-covid, mine went up higher than 2019, which is good. Nothing to write home about. also not a lot to complain as well. The median salary growth predicted for 2020 was at 3.7% to give a benchmark level for the country.
Look ahead into 2021
Given what transpired in 2020, I think the the plan for 2021 needs a post of its own. Subscribe to the RSS feed to find out more.
Conclusion
Again this post is not a humble brag about my portfolio, but rather a self accounting of how I am doing. It is to keep my current self accountable to my future self and provide the transparency to everyone who intends to learn from my experience through the blog.
Wishing everyone a happy, healthy and prosperous 2021..
Good luck and Happy Investing.
#MyFatFIRE
