TLDR: My investment journey 2021 - a review

Year in review 2020

The annual tradition of end of the year review continues in the blog. So how was 2021?

COVID continues to be a challenge in 2021 even with vaccinations and lots of testing. Omicron has emerged has a downer for the holiday period and probably expected to carry into 2022 first half.

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.

As you can see from the numbers, the one indirect benefit of COVID is that my savings rate has been relatively high.

• No vacations (except for couple of short staycations in Singapore)

• No flights

• No eating out (though we ordered in a lot)

MSR has been relatively steady from last year even though we had additional expenses this year.

• Full time live in help

• Younger kid started school

• Wifey in school doing her post grad

But these were mostly compensated by Wifey starting work from mid year.

India Portfolio

The bull run continues into 2021, I have a feeling that the market is too hot right now. I am a buy and hold investor so I am not going to sell off any of my holdings irrespective of the market situation but feels like the market is ripe for correction. The comments from my end of 2020 year review as below.

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.

I felt that the market was overheated end of year 2020, it has moved much further up now at end of 2021. If I had sold off at the end of 2020 I would have completely missed the bull run. So my advice stands “Stay invested to reap the rewards”.

38% increase in 2021 is a nice bump, this is a combination of the bull run and my monthly SIPs as well. Overall a good increase, almost everyone who had stayed invested would have made decent returns.

Global Portfolio

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.

A 45% increase in 2021 is very nice indeed.

Salary

My base pay was stagnant in 2021 even though I had a 10% increase in bonus compared to 2020. So no meaningful chart to update here. Let us see if 2022 is different.

Look ahead into 2022

Given what transpired in 2020, I think the the plan for 2022 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 2022.

Good luck and Happy Investing.

#MyFatFIRE